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January 8, 2005
Manhattan Project Physicist Robert Walker Dies
The Associated Press
TESUQUE — Retired California Institute of Technology physics professor Robert Walker, who worked on the Manhattan Project, was found dead in his northern New Mexico home.
Neighbors found Walker on Wednesday in his Tesuque home, where he had lived alone since his wife, Dorothy, died in 2003. He was 85.
Walker's son, Craig, said his father might have had a heart attack. A message left at the state Office of the Medical Investigator on Saturday was not immediately returned.
Walker was a doctoral student at Cornell University when he joined the effort to produce the first atomic bomb.
During World War II, the top-secret Manhattan Project in Los Alamos developed the world's first atomic bomb. The first device was tested at Trinity Site in the southern New Mexico desert near Alamogordo in the pre-dawn hours of July 16, 1945.
While on the Manhattan Project, Walker worked both at Los Alamos and the University of Chicago. He built pressure gauges to measure the size of blasts. With Cornell physicist Boyce D. McDaniel, Walker invented the pair spectrometer, an important tool used to measure gamma ray energies.
In 1948, Walker received his doctorate in physics from Cornell University. His specialty was high-energy physics.
After a year at Cornell as a postdoctoral researcher, he was hired as an assistant professor at Caltech. He worked on Caltech's synchrotron, first as a co-developer with Robert V. Langmuir and Bruce Rule and then as a researcher for the accelerator's 30-year lifespan.
For many years, Walker also was the principal investigator of Caltech's contract with the U.S. Energy Department and its predecessors to do experimental and theoretical research in elementary-particle physics.
Walker's collaborative research on Caltech's synchrotron helped lay the foundation for what is now known as the standard model of elementary-particle physics, said Charles Peck, a professor emeritus of physics at Caltech who earned his doctorate under Walker.
Peck also called Walker a "superb teacher."
Walker retired in 1981 from Caltech and moved to Tesuque, about six miles north of Santa Fe.
In addition to his science, Walker was known for his bolo tie collection and harpsichords that he made from kits after his retirement.
Michelle Vine, a Caltech secretary, said Walker always had a story to tell about his ties. "You could tell he took a lot of joy in things that were not hardcore science," Vine said.
Walker's harpsichords have been played at the Santa Fe Opera and at the Grand Canyon.
Walker, who collected Southwestern art, served on the board of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, eventually becoming its chairman.
Walker is survived by two children, Craig Walker and a daughter, Jan Walker Roenisch, an artist in Canada.
Memorial services will be in Tesuque and at Caltech.